A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years. As organizations take the next step beyond virtualized data centers and expand their cloud environments, they are faced with what has become known as “virtual image sprawl.”

Virtual images are typically between five to 20 gigabytes in size. Multiply that by the thousands of virtual images created today, with larger enterprises having five to twenty thousand virtual machines, making it costly and challenging for IT managers who are tasked with improving service levels.

“Virtual images are tripling every two years, outpacing the doubling in compute power and essentially flat IT budgets. With current operating practices, every two years, you'd need 1.5 times the physical infrastructure to support cloud and twice the labor. That's an unsustainable cost and management problem which is the exact opposite of the promise of cloud," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “We are delivering a much higher level of control over cloud service delivery allowing our customers to quickly, easily and affordably move to higher levels of value beyond virtualization.”

IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings allow organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with a higher level of control than previously available in the industry. Collectively, the new offerings will help clients speed delivery, lower risk and better control the move to deploy cloud alongside their existing production environments.

Increasing Speed

IBM is offering clients great value and flexibility by delivering best practice cloud services. Since deploying IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, Dutch Cloud has seen its client base expand significantly. However, the high degree of automation built into the IBM solution has greatly reduced Dutch Cloud’s administrative workload.

Now the IT team spends 80 percent of its time on client migrations and only 20 percent of its time on administration—a more than 70 percent decrease in administrative time. Dutch Cloud’s monthly recurring revenue has tripled twice in the last six months but their operational costs have remained flat.

“With our original tool, it could take almost an hour to provision an extra 200 virtual machines for a client,” says Martijn Van Zoeren, CEO, Dutch Cloud. “With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, we can do it within five minutes. Previously, we had to keep changing our tool to support all new versions of VMware, KVM and Microsoft software coming out, and all the new storage versions,” added Van Zoeren. “It was easy to do that when we first started, but we couldn’t maintain it as we grew. We were spending 80 percent of our time maintaining the tool and 20 percent on supporting client requirements.”

With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, new services also can be deployed in minutes rather than hours. This places Dutch Cloud in an ideal position to respond rapidly to fluctuating client needs. The IaaS market is going to continue to mature and we’ll see more competition in the coming years. Our technology choices have given us the ability to thrive in this competitive market.”

Improving Quality

As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realize agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around their development, test and deployment operations. SunTrust bank is working with IBM’s DevOps solution to increase their business agility while increasing operational discipline, quality, customer satisfaction and governance. Utilizing a cloud environment, SunTrust developers have been able to achieve application build times up to five times faster.

Building on that and other experiences with clients, IBM will be releasing new capabilities with IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery. The new software is a suite of best practice patterns for enabling integrated lifecycle management of cloud services, combining Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management solutions with IBM SmartCloud Provsioning. The recent Green Hat acquisition will further extend these capabilities reducing development lifecycle times by streamlining test cycles as applications are transitioned to cloud deployments.

Clients using the software have seen dramatic results, including:

· Shortened delivery time from months to days through end-to-end automation, standardization and repeatability

· 40 percent more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication

· 20 percent increases in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder alignment of development, test and ops

Reducing Risk, Controlling Complexity

Enterprises view cloud computing as a way to improve responsiveness and change the economics of IT. At the same time, the envelope of IT is stretching way beyond the data center, networks and workstations to new classes of mobile assets with embedded intelligence.

Clients need to exert the same control over this virtualized, distributed world as they would exert over prior models of IT. In order to address this IBM has launched new offerings, including:

· IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides organizations the ability to maintain configuration integrity in response to planned changes and unplanned incidents and problems occuring across a complex IT landscape to ensure continuity of service, speed of response, and efficiency of management.

· IBM Endpoint Managerfor Mobile Devices helps firms better manage and secure their mobile environments, including iPhone, iPad, Android-based phones and tablets, Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian devices. With the ability to install in minutes, organizations will quickly be able to remotely set policies, monitor employees’ devices to identify potential data compromise and wipe data off the devices if they are lost or stolen.

By leveraging key innovations in cloud environment capacity analytics, storage utilization and optimization, operations teams can shift their focus from managing environment bottlenecks to delivering innovative best of breed services. IBM is offering:

IBM has helped thousands of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud based transactions every day. IBM assists clients in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services. IBM is unique in bringing together key cloud technologies, deep process knowledge, a broad portfolio of cloud solutions, and a network of global delivery centers. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visithttp://www.ibm.com/smartcloud. Follow us on Twitter at @ibmcloud.